We’re Hiring

We’ve filled these positions, but if you think you’d be a great fit, don’t be afraid to reach out and apply anyway. We’re always open to hearing from talented people who want to join our team.

The short story: One Day, One Job and One Day, One Internship are growing. We’re profitable and we’re helping people land awesome jobs and internships, but we want to do it on a bigger scale. By we, I mean me. I’ve been doing this (mostly) alone for four years now, and I need help growing the business. I can’t commit to hiring anyone full-time yet, so I decided to take on a few PAID interns/part-timers starting this summer.

I'm underwater. Help me!

The Backstory

I graduated a semester early from Cornell University in 2006 with good grades, good internship experience, and a pretty good economy, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I struggled through a half-hearted job search and eventually realized that I was meant to be an entrepreneur. So I started a business to help other college grads do what I failed to do: land a job.

A lot of people ask me why a college student would want help finding a job from some guy who couldn’t even find a job for himself. I don’t have a perfect answer, but I strongly believe that you often learn more from failure than you do from success. I’ve also learned a lot through entrepreneurship, and I think most of it applies to the job search. My best answer? Look at the results. We have a long list of success stories that keeps on growing… and the business is making money.

We have our own stickers and I get to work outside when it's nice out. We must be successful.

The Next Step

Early on I decided that One Day, One Job should not only help college students and grads find meaningful employment, but it should also employ the same people it serves. Unfortunately, generating enough revenue to support an employee took much longer than I expected (we never took any investment, and we don’t intend to).

Over the years I’ve had a ton of people recommend that I take on a bunch of unpaid interns and make them slave away on whatever menial tasks I didn’t want to do. It’s tempting, but it’s against my business ethics. My business is all about serving interns–why would I turn around and exploit them (and potentially break the law)?

Paying interns/employees isn’t just an ethical stand for me (and I don’t mean paying them with free career advice like some “career experts” do). It’s a good business decision. By giving a person’s time a specific cost, I’m ensuring that I will make smart decisions about the projects I assign. I fully expect my investment in interns to be profitable. I don’t drink coffee and my business has never needed a copy. If you work for me, you will be working on projects that are directly focused on growing our revenue.

I'll show you the money (not this much), but you better be worth it!

The Positions

The One Day, One Job/Internship business model isn’t all that complicated. We produce editorial content for job and internship seekers. We sell advertising opportunities on top of that content. As our audience grows, we make more money.

Since I can’t commit to hiring anyone full-time, you’ll be working on a project basis. We’ll work out all of the details during the interview/hiring process. If you do a good job and your work helps grow the business, then there’s a good chance that this could turn into a longer term position and maybe even something full-time.

I’m based in Chicago, IL. I usually work from home. I don’t want you in my house every morning. My preference would be to hire someone based in Chicago, because then we could meet face to face occasionally; however, I’m extremely open to hiring anyone anywhere (as long as he or she has access to a personal computer with reliable Internet access) who can do the job well and will make the most of the experience.

This is a Hummingbird Moth. You need to be quicker than one of these.

I’m looking for people who can do one or more of the following things:

Writing/Editorial/Content Development

What You’ll Do: Most of our readers find us through search engines (it’s probably how you found us). We rank well in search engines because we have great content–mostly in the form of our company profiles. If we want to attract more people to the site, we not only need to create more content, but we need to create more kinds of content. And it has to be the kind of content that employment-minded college students are looking for (hint: it’s not general career advice).

The trick is that we want to build a process for building content (you may want to Google “scalable content creation” or read this post on scalable content creation). Not only will you be doing the research and writing, but you’ll also be developing a process that enables you and future employees to generate more quality content more quickly.

If you do well, you’ll get the opportunity to start researching and writing some of our daily company profiles too.

You'll learn to love the WordPress Admin screen.

What You’ll Learn: I won’t teach you how to write, but I’ll do my best to help make you a better writer. You’ll be doing a lot of writing, and it will be for a specific audience with a very clear purpose. It’s much harder than it seems.

I’ll teach you how to find areas that are underserved by the current content available on the Internet and how to develop content that fills these needs and is optimized for both readers and search engines.

If you want to build a career off of your writing skills, you need to know how to write content that will get read. You also need to know how to write stuff that will be profitable for the publisher. It may not be writing a novel in a log cabin on an old-fashioned typewriter, but it’s a marketable skill that will open up plenty of opportunities for you. This position will teach you how to be the kind of writer that is essential to a business.

Marketing/Outreach/SEO

What You’ll Do: Most of our readers find us through search engines (it’s probably how you found us). We rank well in search engines because we have great content. Great content by itself doesn’t bring traffic. I’ve worked tirelessly to get people to link to and share the content that I’ve developed over the last 4 years, but I haven’t been as organized about it as I should have been.

You’ll be developing a system for spreading the word about One Day, One Job and One Day, One Internship. This means identifying the best opportunities for promotion, doing the actual outreach, and tracking the progress. This has a dual purpose. Not only is the traffic that comes directly from outreach activities important, but the links that the outreach generates help to improve our rankings in search engines.

Open Site Explorer will be your friend.

What You’ll Learn: A lot of people think that search engine optimization is behind the scenes voodoo that webmasters do to get their sites to rank better. There are some secrets like that, but most of it comes down to generating quality content (see the position above) and getting people to link to it. I’ll teach you the ins and outs of off-site SEO.

Getting people to talk about you is all about providing them with value. You’ll learn how to identify whom to pitch and how to craft a pitch that offers the target the maximum value.

Web Design/Development/User Experience

What You’ll Do: One Day, One Job and One Day, One Internship are built on WordPress with a customized version of the Thesis Theme. Our daily e-mails are delivered via Aweber. Our sites are hosted with VPS.net on a cloud server with 2.4 Ghz of dedicated CPU and 1.5 GB dedicated RAM. I’m not a tech expert, but I know enough HTML, CSS, Javascript, and PHP to have built the site into what it is. I’d like to build it into something more.

One Day, One Job is all about content, whether it’s delivered through e-mail or on the web. We want to create an experience that encourages our users to engage more deeply with our content. That means reading more posts, subscribing to our e-mail list, and, yes, clicking on ads. You’ll be tasked with helping us develop better user experiences through better design and better use of technology. There’s a lot of flexibility here, so creativity is a huge plus.

Think you can do better than this? I do.

What You’ll Learn: While I have a ton of experience with content development and outreach, design and web development are still weak spots for me. I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to teach you, but I’ll give you the opportunity to use our audience to literally test your skills. You’ll get a chance to see how design decisions can directly impact a business.

How to Apply

E-mail me at willy@onedayonejob.com.

If you have any general questions, please post them as comments below so that everyone can enjoy the benefit of seeing the answer.

33 responses to “We’re Hiring”

Both are flexible. I’d prefer to get the hiring process done in the next two weeks and have those who are hired start working on projects immediately after. I’d expect at least a 4 week commitment, and if things work out I’d like the relationship to continue indefinitely. Since the goal for each of these positions is to help grow revenue, my hope is that I’ll get to a point where I can take one or two people on full-time.

There aren’t any specific experience requirements, but I do want to know that you’ll be able to jump right in and do the job. I’m more interested in seeing what you’ve done than hearing about how many years you’ve been doing it.

Yes. I’ve given it a lot of thought. I decided it’s best to determine pay on an individual basis. I’ve considered both by the project and hourly pay, but I’m going to wait to decide which way to go based on my discussions with candidates.

Yes. I’m going to keep accepting resumes indefinitely, but I’m getting very close to filling the positions. I’m always open to having people pitching me about a position even if I’m not actively hiring.

I am an undergraduate student who would like to own my own blog and e-commece business as my career goals. I am majoring in psychology and communication, and attending graduate school for E-commerce. I have been looking around for internships or jobs that would help me learn website development, coding, design etc. I was wondering if you considered taking on students who were eager to learn, but also had no previous experience. I read the previous statement about your business ethics; I however, would be happy to work for free just to gain the knowledge.

I feel that this was a great idea and a great way to start a company. It is kind of ironic how you didn’t know where you wanted to work or what to do so you decided to start a company that helped people in your situation. It is a very good idea and I am impressed at how well it has turned out.